German Idealism and Psychoanalysis with Slavoj Zizek, Alenka Zupancic, Mladen Dolar

I would like to see German Idealism: A Freud0-Marxist perspective,  but this is still interesting:

Aesthetics and the Subject, Part 1 (You are NOT a subject: On poetic subjectization)

“Every subject stands at the crossing between a lack of being and a destruction, a repetition and an interruption, a placement and an excess” – Alain Badiou, “Theory of the Subject” (translated Bruno Bosteels)

One of the essential mystifications of art as a form of commodity is the confusion of the self as the subject of art instead of art engaging with and emerging into a subject.  What do I mean by this?  In poetry of the end from the twentieth century, from confessional poetry to hyper-form, the self has been the center of the lyric.  The subject of the poem is often equivocated the subject of the speaker within the poem as if the poetry was speaking in one voice: a solitary voice.

But the crossing to which both a “subject” of the poem and a “subjectivity” of the reader/writer is not one that is constructed individually.  It is both dialectical and dialogic—that is the subject of the poem and subjectivity of the writer/reader emerge from the event of reading itself.   Furthermore, the trace of reading is the interpretative impulse between the two in which both one consciousness is opposed to another–the reader who assumes the voice of poem in reading is not the voice of the poem in the reader’s own mine—but also the two collectively inform each other as subjects arises from the disappearance of the event itself.  There for not “poem qua poem” nor “what you are” constitute the subject to which the possibilities Badiou gives us are actually emergent.

As Badiou says in a talk at Lacan Ink,”The Subject of Art”, translated here by Lydia Kerr:

The point is that the relation, the subjective relation between an event and the world cannot be a direct relation.  Why?  Because an event disappears on one side, and on the other side we never have a relation with the totality of the world.  So when I say that the subject is a relation between an event and the world we have to understand that as an indirect relation between something of the event and something of the world.  The relation, finally, is between a trace and the body.  I call trace ‘what subsists in the world when the event disappears.’  It’s something of the event, but not the event as such; it is the trace, a mark, a symptom.  And on the other side, the support of the subject—the reality of the subject in the world—I call ‘a new body.’  So we can say that the subject is always a new relation between a trace and a body.  It is the construction in a world, of a new body, and jurisdiction—the commitment of a trace; and the process of the relationship between the trace and the body is, properly, the new subject.

Despite the obscurity of some of the terminology I am employing, this helps us understand that the subject of a life or a work of art emerges in regards to an event, and the subjectivity is related to that emergence.   What are the implications is have for the “I” of the poem?

So here I must to allow myself a fugue:

I have stated that I will never identify myself a poet, even though I write verse.  Poet is, from the Greek, a maker.  I do not make anything.  When I sit at the pressboard desk and write for hours, be it with pencil or by the clicking of keys, I am not making.  I am presenting what the events of the world have implanted in me and polishing it off moving further and further from that very event.  This is not to say that the language does not emerge from my subjectivity, but that my subjectivity is not constructed all in my own person.

To identify oneself as a poet, then, is a pretense of originality: it is an illusion and one that treats poetic creation as a commodity instead of an emergence.   The world is without self, and subject is not the self. A maker implies selfhood.  This is against both my aesthetics and my politics. When I write about myself, as I do in my poem, “Neon Cross at 16th and Cherry,” I am not particularly concerned about my own selfhood, but rather the lack of it. The lack of self allows the subject of my being may emerge as the relational nature of the emergence of subjectivity is more obvious in that moment:

Browning buildings rest downtown, a meeting

of roads at the skeleton of a Jesuit mission.  On

 

dusty glass, under the diminished glow of “-ESUS

S-VES,” there are two tubes of gas slowly burning

 

as if to denote where the vertical meets the

horizontal, or where alpha can slip omega

 

the tongue.   A pigeon lays splayed in the

gutter nearby, a beetle crushed in the beak

 

hook.   Sinew and feathers color the pavement

where bird crossed paths with a Ford pick-up

 

under the guidance of artificial light.

Alpha is a neon inspiration, flickering as a

 

Beacon to all poor sinners.  Yet, Omega is more

abundant: the beetle, the pigeon, the fender, and

 

the abandoned soup kitchen.  Alpha and Omega

may be laughing as they roll in the bushes, but

 

ants still crawl over blood on the roadside.

Here the narrator is an I, but I am not functioning to create the scene. The pigeon, the beetle, the electric lights of the mission have a being much larger than myself and it is there traces that we see in the words I use to represent them.   The philosophical implications here are manifold. Life continues on without the artist and the disingenuous argument for the poem making anything immortal here is far beyond the point.   This a subject presented in the language and idiom I understand. I did not make this—at least, I did not make it as a solitary act emerging solely from my consciousness.  The language stems beyond me, the beetle’s crushed mandibles have long since decayed, the cultural baggage of English brings in revelations I did not know and do not intend, and the bird feathers have probably washed down a sewage drain.

But the constitutive elements cannot be said to be the poem any more than the sign and signified can be said to be co-terminus.  The first aesthetic implication is that you are not the subject.  Not the “you” of the reader or the you of the author.    But this is not just the result of the discourse theory, for this not a jumble of disembodied selves discoursing to create an “author” either.   This is the trace of an event emerging into art.   The removal of the pretense of the confession makes easier the subjectivity within the poem manifest as the event of its creation disappears.

Musing on Sam Mende’s American Beauty

Today I taught to Korean students Sam Mende’s American Beauty, one of those films whose popularity was only really rivaled by the backlash against it a few years later. In many ways, I think the films beauty was in the way it undermines the bourgeois romantic trappings it gives itself. Obviously, the movie for all its gloss and hyper-exact sensibilities has a sloppy middle class family message with Lester’s monologue on at the end trying to wring the sentimental  family gloss to an otherwise nihilistic tail with some only thinly veiled cliches.  This film cries out for the a Lacanian (phallic mother, oedipal sublimation) and vulgar Marxist (Lester and Caroline as alienated from each other through tedious production of capital as well as alienated from human relationships themselves) readings. Those rubrics won’t be particularly illuminating because a college junior with either an introduction to philosophy or an introduction to critical theory course could write them.   Hell, a blogger for the Village Voice could probably write a hip less jargon-laden version of exactly that.

No, what I want to focus on is the film’s own almost dialectical undercutting of its own romanticism, because in lesser’s supposed enlightenment after his brains are splattered against the white wall, he still sees himself as fundamentally concerned with his relationships fulfillment to him. His last vision is one of narcissistic and self-indulgent interiority leaving his family in the ruins that they did not entirely make. It is the picture whose romanticism also shows romanticism nihilism because it literally offers no way out. The moment Lester realizes his dream–his roses–was in his house the entire time, he is shot in the head. This absolves him of the responsibility of cleaning up the mess.  Furthermore, his alienation and the implicit violence in his family remained unresolved.

In many ways, American Beauty is an excellent movie despite its impulses–it is hard to say where Mende’s intended this dialectical undercutting–this negative dialectic–into his film deliberately. If the sentimental films he made after it are any indication–with the notable exception of Jarhead–Mende’s aesthetic is problematically middle brow.  Yet, perhaps like Balzac and Dickens (or the science fiction writer Gene Wolfe) it is often a conservative or middle-brow disposition that allows enough of the contradictions of its own position into it to truly illuminate the social and cultural problems of a given moment.   In this way American Beauty succeeds precisely because of its failure.

Does Poetry Matter? (To Me.)

I have been losing my want to write poems lately. Hardly seemingly related to what I write about here, no? Last year was one of my best publication years as I radically changed my life. My work has been largely apolitical as you can see in my recent published poems (here, here, here, here, here, and here)

What is happening is that I don’t want to write propaganda, but I also find myself moved in a different direction in my personal life. I suppose it’s obvious that even Karl Marx wrote poetry. Not of the social realist variety that Georg Lukács would have approved either.

Here’s my concern: I think aesthetics is a form of rebellion, but it doesn’t put food on the table for myself or my readers. Much of the time I am overly concerned that sophistication is merely a proxy for distinction, which, in many ways, in unavoidable. Yet to give up my work seems like an abandonment of my will, of the idea of devoting part of my life to something truly beautiful and creative but in a way that is essentially not entangled in production of commodities. I don’t generally get paid for poetry, and really all poetry publication these days seems to be an obscure form of cultural capital as much as money or general prestige.

There are times, however, where this feels like a waste. In fact, this looms from Adorno:

Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben.- Theodor Adorno.

I am a poet and a cultural critic and I am definitely after Auschwitz. Barbarity in my time has decreased, although there isn’t much room for reflection, but if one actually looks at the sources of the quote, you see the following beginning portion of the essay (which I will give to you in English):

To anyone in the habit of thinking with his ears, the words ‘cultural criticism’ (Kulturkritik) must have an offensive ring, not merely because, like automobile, they are pieced together from Latin and Greek. The words recall a flagrant contradiction. The cultural critic is not happy with civilization, to which alone he owes his discontent. He speaks as if he represents unadulterated nature or a higher historical stage. Yet he is necessarily of the same essence as that to which he fancies himself superior.

The issue was not poetry, but the cultural critic. So I turn to essay of politic poetry by Gregory Orr:

Sometimes, however, persuasion is a matter of timing. That is, aside from the question of whether a poem is political, there is also the question of when a poem is political. Auden wrote “September 1, 1939,” as a rhetorical (and anti-rhetorical) response to Germany’s invasion of Poland. Then, its political moment past, the poem spent decades as a vague statement about being one of “the Just” who are, alas, so widely misunderstood—and Auden became annoyed enough with its self-congratulatory tone that he left it out of collections. But then, of course, came September 11, 2001, and the poem emerged again as fully political, fully connected to the spirit of a time and place. Indeed, Auden’s poem has few rivals among the poetry associated with September 11. One of them, though, might be “Home to Roost” by Kay Ryan:
The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small—
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.

The only problem, of course, is that “Home to Roost” was written prior to September 11 and has nothing whatsoever to do with the attack, its aftermath, or the now-famous invocation of this specific phrase by Jeremiah Wright. Ryan enjoys tweaking clichés, but when a particular cliché is thrown into political relief—as often happens—then her poem tends to follow. It’ll be another five years before she can call this one her own again, which probably annoys her endlessly.

One of the problems with political poetry, then, is that like all speech, it exists at the mercy of time, history, and other people. But that doesn’t mean poetry itself is passive. While it’s probably true that most poets are not, as Tom Buffenbarger said, “fighters”—by which he meant “political actors”—it’s also true that poems like “Home to Roost” are unpredictable. They have their own realities, and the worlds they contain cannot be lightly dismissed. And as a maker of poems, a poet is always engaged in battle, though the opponents may be unclear, the stakes unknowable, and the victories and defeats felt far away, in different domains, by people other than himself.

I write for hope that something in this is beyond myself. If I wrote for me or even for my own profit, it wouldn’t matter. The incentives would be all wrong.

Dinner with Myself: Wallace Shawn, Isolation, Politics, and the mythical Andre

I was eating a dinner of kimchi, pork, sigeumchi namul, and acorn jelly in the cafeteria of the university where I work. I almost choked on a renegade piece of kimchi as I listened to a podcast that that Flickers on the Cave did on Dinner with Andre. You see, I flashed back to a moment when I was arguing with my ex-wife over mid-summer over a writing project and then listened to NPR on my computer. Particularly a episode of the The Leonard Lopate Show on Wallace Shawn’s book Essays. I remember looking it up and seeing that Wallace Shawn, the dinosaur from Toy Story, released a book from a press noted for publishing essays on socialism, anarchism, and left-wing history.

You know, this guy:

In the crisp autumn Korean air as I eat my lunch and listened to a movie podcast, the absurdity of that just washed over me for a while. Yet there is something about Wallace Shawn that I identify with. I remember reading this when I bought that book of essays by Shawn:

Born by most definitions into the ruling class, I was destined to live a comfortable life. And to spend one’s life as a so-called “creative artist” is probably the most comfortable, cozy, and privileged life that a human being can live on this earth—the most “bourgeois” life, if one uses that phrase to describe a life so comfortable that no one living it would want to give it up. To lie in bed and watch words bump together until they become sentences is a form of hedonism, whether the words and sentences glorify society and the status quo or denounce them.

I would say that as a poet and a writer, this hits home. Now what I do is not lying in bed watching words bump together, but it is definitely work that, while difficult, is privileged and akin to hedonism. I don’t know that I have Wallace Shawn’s seemingly puritanical self-reproachment, but that naked and vulnerable honesty speaks to me.

I remember reading this in an essay that Shawn published at Tom Dispatch:

Our capacity to fantasize about other people and to believe our own fantasies makes it possible for us to enjoy this valuable art form, theater. But unfortunately it’s a capacity which has brought incalculable harm and suffering to human beings.

It’s well known what grief and even danger can result when we make use of this capacity in our romantic lives and eagerly ascribe to a potential partner benevolent characteristics which are based on our hopes and not on truth.

And one can hardly begin to describe the anguish caused by our habit of using our fantasizing capacity in the opposite direction, that is, using it to ascribe negative characteristics to people who, for one reason or another, we’d like to think less of. Sometimes we do this in regard to large groups of people, none of whom we’ve met. But we can even apply our remarkable capacity in relation to individuals or groups whom we know rather well, sometimes simply to make ourselves feel better about things that we happen to have done to them or are planning to do.

You couldn’t exactly say, for example, that Thomas Jefferson had no familiarity with dark-skinned people. His problem was that he couldn’t figure out how to live the life he in fact was living unless he owned these people as slaves. And as it would have been unbearable to him to see himself as so heartless, unjust, and cruel as to keep in bondage people who were just like himself, he ignored the evidence that was in front of his eyes and clung to the fantasy that people from Africa were not his equals.

Well, one could write an entire political history of the human race by simply recounting the exhausting cycle of fantasies which different groups have believed at different times about different other groups. Of course these fantasies were absurd in every case.

After a while one does grasp the pattern. Africans, Jews, Mexicans, same-sex lovers, women. Hmm, after a certain period of time somebody says: well, actually, they’re not that different from anybody else, they have the same capacities, I don’t like all of them, some of them are geniuses, etc. etc. The revelations are always in the same direction. We learn about one group or another the thing that actors quickly learn in relation to themselves when they become actors: people are more than they seem to be.

We’re all rather good at seeing through last year’s fantasies and moving on — and rather proud of it too. “Oh yes, after voting for Barack Obama, we took a marvelous vacation in Vietnam,” “We went to a reading of the poetry of Octavio Paz with our friends the Goldsteins, and we saw Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi there — they looked fantastic”… whatever.

It’s this year’s fantasies that present a difficulty.

Are we more brilliant than Thomas Jefferson? Hmm — probably not. So there’s our situation: it’s delightfully easy to see through illusions held by people far away or by members of one’s own group a century ago or a decade ago or a year ago. But this doesn’t seem to help us to see through the illusions which, at any given moment, happen to be shared by the people who surround us, our friends, our family, the people we trust.

I thought of all the political rants and self-righteous I have had in other periods of my life. I too call myself a socialist. Probably to the left of Mr. Wallace. So listening to Wallace Shawn on Tom’s podcast was interesting, was interesting because Shawn Wallace sounded like every man’s Adorno.

(For example Wallace is saying something like this: In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a ‘crooner’. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves ‘jitter-bugs’, bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.- Adorno)

In this I remember the first time I watched dinner with Andre, everything Andre said about peak experiences and the danger of being asleep amazed me. I still see some truth in the posturing of the mythical Andre, but it’s Wallie’s self-honesty that moved me.

For a second, I thought of the years I toiled as a teacher. For second, I thought about how seeing my then wife sleep in the morning made me day better. For a second, I remembered that is part of the absurdity of life. A grown man who has the time to professionally write poetry between teaching and rebuilding his life. For a second, I thought of that dinosaur who calls himself a socialist. Then I caught my breathe, chewed my kimchi, went to drink my glass of water from a steel cup as a put away my waste as is the custom here in Korea.

When I went outside, the air seemed colder than it did when I went it. I too call myself a socialist. While I wasn’t born into the upper class, in fact far from it, but in a way my position really is inconceivable.